Wrath of the Titans is a clunky inept sequel to a clunky inept remake of a clunky inept movie from the 1980s. Young Boomers/older Gen Xers, who thought the original Clash of the Titans was great because they were young and impressionable when it first came out (and were probably stoned when they saw it) are now the people green-lighting the big budget IMAX 3D reboots of movies that they would realize weren’t very good if they weren’t currently working as “Creatives” and consequently making business decisions while smoking pot.

The people who greenlit this movie also know two things. One, that the kids who are willing to shell out weekend box-office don’t comprehend, or care, that the original movie was Not Great. Two, GenXers will Netflix or purchase the reboot in a fit of pique and/or out of misguided nostalgia. What this means is this: lots of people will get paid.

I just watched The Haunting (1963), one of the all-time scariest movies of all time ever. I spotted the 1999 remake on HBOHD and, being too sick to think, decided to see if it was as bad as I remembered.

It was. Got a post about that drafted, you’ll have to wait for it a little longer – the relevant point here is that the remake starred Liam Neesen.

I’ve been sick for 3 weeks. I don’t know what Husband’s excuse is. I guess that doesn’t explain the last 20some years of our movie watching co-existence, does it?

Moving on.

I guess I have to quit copying IMDB links for Liam Neeson movies and pay attention to the screen if I want to describe Wrath of the Titans to you. There aren’t any spoilers in here. To be fair, I think to have a movie spoiled you probably need to care about the outcome. Trust me, no one should care about the outcome of this movie.

Except Liam Neeson’s agent, who should probably wake up with a horse head in his bed or something. This dude has been in some shitty, shitty movies.

Wrath of the Titans. Wrath of the Titans is about Perseus and Zeus and a bunch of other Gods who lived back in the Ancient Greek Lack of Hygiene World.

Liam Neeson is Zeus. His half-human son, Perseus, has to rescue him from the underworld and

I just realized I’ve been sitting here trying to remember why the guy woke up with the horse head in his bed in the Godfather and I’ve forgotten what came next in that unfinished sentence you see above this paragraph. I fall asleep every time I try to watch the Godfather. I’ve seen the scene but I have no idea what it means. (What? It was before my time. Plus I was afraid of New Jersey as a kid so the Godfather isn’t really my thing. Sorry).

Back to Wrath of the Titans.

Perseus has Poseiden’s pitchfork. It’s a Magical God Pitchfork, which means that it glows orange whenever it’s near manure, I think. That describes the overall quality of the script for this movie, so the pitchfork glows a lot. Husband thinks it might be more complicated than that, but Husband had to get up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday and work all day and he’s had a few drinks so I don’t know that you should trust him.

Plus, he’s still really bitter about the whole midi-chlorians thing, which he seems to be holding Liam Neeson personally responsible for.

So, Perseus has the pitchfork and he goes off to find his Dad.

Perseus ends up in a cave with Bill Nighy, one of our favorite actors. Nighy performs a monologue from a one-man Off Broadway show. Or outtakes from Love Actually. I’m not really sure, but I think it must be one of those. Then he shows Perseus and Andromeda a shortcut to destroy the Underworld that seems to defeat the whole “I’m on an epic quest” story-arc.

Husband: “There’s a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port!”

Liam Neeson, incidentally, was in Love Actually.

Wait, what’s Andromeda doing there? When did she show up? Perseus rode off alone on his Pegasus. Then he fought a bunch of badly rendered monsters and then I think he flew around some more.

Whatever.

Sometimes the dialogue is hard to understand. The sound mixing is actually pretty good. To be honest, the biggest problem is that we keep yelling lines from other movies, which makes it hard for us to hear the movie we’re watching. Husband hasn’t seen Taken, and neither of us has seen Taken 2 or the forthcoming Taken 3: the Quickening, but all of the trailers look the same so it seems safe to just make up dialogue.

Seriously, how many movies can there be in the Someone Stole Liam Neeson’s Daughter franchise?

It’s possible I made Taken 3 up…but I bet it gets made.

Since Perseus gets around on a fast-flying Pegasus, I’m not really clear on how all the other characters seem to be able to keep up with him. Nevertheless, Pegasus and Perseus go flapping away and everyone they left behind is just somehow with them in the next scene.

Husband: “A small one-man fighter should be able to penetrate the outer defense!”

Hang on a second, there’s some kind of fire-monster warrior guys attacking our band of plucky morons. That’s sort of cool.

Honestly, I have no idea what’s happening.

Husband: “Get this big walking carpet out of my way.”

The tagline for Wrath of the Titans is “Feel the Wrath.” That’s the best they could do?

Anyway, Andromeda and Perseus are on an epic quest. At some point while I was trying to make up a joke about feeling the wrath a bunch of shit happened and now I’m confused about who’s fighting who or what the quest is. It seems to have changed.

I actually thought the movie was over because they’d gotten out of the Underworld and put on deodorant (I think that’s what they were doing. I might be mistaken). But now the people who I thought were mortal enemies are fighting on the same side and I can’t figure out who in the hell they’re fighting.

We aren’t even bothering to recite movie dialogue anymore, we’re just moaning and mumbling to ourselves. Husband just said something about his blast-shield being down, but, having realized that the credits are rolling and our servitude is over, we’re both too busy scrambling for the remote to think clearly.

post-script
After the movie ended I was giving this post a quick edit to remove eighty percent of the profanity while Husband stared at the blank TV screen looking, frankly, happier than he’d looked over the last 92 minutes. That was when our furnace – which is located in the basement – directly below the television – emitted a terrible sound.

Husband has been down there for the last 10 minutes trying to repair it enough that it will limp along until Monday. Mostly, we’d prefer not to pay Double Jeopardy Magical Super-Overtime, or whatever the rate is you have to pay for a furnace repair at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night in February. Honestly, I’m also a little afraid if we call the furnace company they’ll send Liam Neeson over. Or, the more likely scenario will occur: my cough medicine will take control of my mouth and I’ll just blurt out a request that they not to send Liam Neeson.

They probably don’t get a lot of out-of-the-blue requests to not have Liam Neeson dispatched to people’s homes. It actually wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’ve ever called and asked them. Still, cross your fingers that Husband’s repair gets us through. Just in case, we won’t be subjecting the furnace to any more bad movies this weekend. It’s all Downton Abbey from here on out.

We saw a trailer for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. In an fit of pop culture conformity we decided to watch the last two Pirates movies since we’d only seen the 1st one.

We slogged through Dead Man’s Chest. Good movie? Not really, but it was fairly entertaining. We adore Bill Nighy and Johnny Depp is Johnny Depp.

Next, we tried to watch At World’s End. How bad could it be?

When I put it on the Netflix queue, one of the reviews said, “Everything you expect and less.”

That was an overly generous assessment.

Rotten Tomatoes tells the whole story. If only Rotten Tomatoes also told the actual story, because I have to tell you that the what was playing out on the screen was a stupid mess that didn’t make much sense.

When we paused the movie after nearly an hour and saw that it still had TWO HOURS LEFT we decided to watch an old episode of Charlie’s Angels and go to bed. We didn’t bother to finish watching the Pirates movie because it bored us to tears.

We are the people who watched the Jayne Mansfield Story , a movie narrated by Arnold Schwartznegger. Before he learned to speak English even somewhat phonetically. Best line: “Buuuf Jaaaaaa Ahhh Lav Ewe.”

We are the people who watched William Shatner’s Incubus. Incubus, the 1st – and only – feature film entirely in the made-up language of Esperanto.

We are not an easily defeated people.

Sidenote: we’re watching Love and Other Drugs while I write this draft. Not boring at all, but I mention it because I’ve realized that the giant eyeballs of Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are distracting when the two of them are onscreen together. These people can’t be a couple. If these people breed, they’ll give birth to fish-eyed babies. Really super-cute fish-eyed babies, but still, fish-eyed babies.

Where was I? Oh, right. Boredom. I’ve watched every single episode of Land of the Lost. To the best of my knowledge, the only people on Earth who can make that claim are me and Will Ferrel. He no doubt got an assload of cash out of the deal. I did not, but I probably should have.

You may think you’ve seen every episode of Land of the Lost, because they used to show the same 6 episodes over and over in rotation with other Sid and Marty Krofft shows on Saturday mornings. You have not seen every episode. There are FORTY-THREE episodes of Land of the Lost and if you try to watch them all they will crush your soul.

We didn’t give up on At World’s End immediately. We left it in the bluray player for a few days. Periodically, we’d sit in the living room and stare at the dark TV screen while trying to psych ourselves into finishing the movie.

Years ago, right after it opened, we went to see the Matrix. It hadn’t become a massive phenomenon yet, but the “What is the Matrix?” ad campaign and Keanu Reeve’s face were inescapable. Sometime in the middle of the 1st act, a couple came in and sat next to us. He was next to me, she was next to him.

5 minutes after they sat down the woman blurted, “Keanue Reeves is in this!”

I finally shamed them with my shushing and aggressively assertive dirty looks. Her boyfriend told her she needed to shut up because she was annoying everyone else. She finally seemed contrite.

A few minutes of blessed silence.

Then.

“Did I tell you your sister called?” He asked her.
“No, what’d she want?” She replied.
“She just called to say hi.”

When we tried to watch At World’s End, I found myself missing my old friends from the Matrix. Had they been here there at least would have been something coherent to listen to.

Hathaway. Gyllenhaal. Gigantic eyeballs.

Eventually we abandoned the idea of trying to slog through the rest of the movie. We took it out of the player. We looked at the disk as we put it back in the Netflix envelope. Even looking at the disk bored us.

Seriously, what are Jake and Anne’s combined ocular volume? It must be abnormally large. It can’t just be that they both have prominent orbital sockets.

I was going to take a staged photo of Husband looking bored while holding the At World’s End disk, but even the idea of getting the camera to take the picture bored us.

We actually own Hellbound, the Jayne Mansfield Story, and Galactica 1980. No one should own Bloodrayne.

You could argue that Ed Wood was boring, and you’d be right. But Ed Wood’s boringness was wrapped in a crunchy shell of exuberant wackiness that you can’t stop watching. You might lose consciousness, but later you’ll be sorry you did and you’ll try again and eventually you’ll finish the movie. Plus, Ed Wood’s movies were short. This Pirates thing? It’s 3 hours long. 3 hours of a plot better suited to a candybar commercial.

The average human eyeball weighs about 7.5 grams and has a volume of 5.5 cm3.

A movie can be inept and still have charm, or at least entertainment value. You can dress dogs up in fur remnants and call them Killer Shrews. You can drop the boom into the shot, put a pig mask on an otherwise naked Peter Coyote, or create a plot that’s so scientifically implausible even Glenn Beck knows it’s inaccurate. Just don’t be boring.

Don’t ever, ever, ever be boring. Boring is a sin.

I’d like to retract the statement about Peter Coyote and the pig mask. That was a terrible movie. Still, we finished watching it. Or we all passed out. I can’t say for sure – that was a long time ago.

At World’s End was so boring I can’t even blog about it without taking little breaks to think about other things. I’m not sure we’ll go to see the 4th installment, On Stranger Tides. It’s 3D and the trailer looks cool, but I remember people getting excited about the trailer for Waterworld, too, and look how well that turned out.

Through the judicious use of the fast forward button, you can condense the movie down to about 27 minutes of entertainment. That’s not enough to salvage the movie, but it’s an amusing way to spend time drinking a cup of coffee. Even the casting of Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin couldn’t save this movie.

It occurs to me that if you really disliked someone, you could give them this movie as a present and then insist they watch it. To be sure they have to sit through the whole thing, bring beer, act deadly serious about the entire enterprise and keep control of the remote. Rewind and re-watch the “good” parts just to drag out the “fun.” You’ll suffer, too, but I suspect that your target will never, ever bother you again. (I wonder if this would work on a squirrel?)

Highpoints of “the film” included a graphic slo-motion sex scene in some sort of dungeon. This scene did not, thankfully, involve Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin. Additionally, there was a lengthy and bizarrely random montage of decapitations with gratuitous arterial blood spurts that were totally out of sync with the rest of the movie in just about every way imagineable, including plot, tone, pacing and lighting.

Also, Michelle Rodriguez in what appeared to be a pirate’s costume. It’s possible that by this point I just wasn’t paying attention at all anymore, so I’m loathe to mention that I’m pretty sure Meat Loaf was running around in drag.

Not even Rayne’s propensity to miss her mouth while gulping blood from a chalice, thereby enabling said blood to splash artfully down her cleavage, could save this stinker.

I think I’m making it sound much better than it is.

At least Michelle Rodriguez can probably cop a “I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing” plea. Sadly, I just realized the film was written by Guinevere Turner who turned the screenplay of American Psycho into a cutting (no pun intended) feminist social satire. I guess everyone has to pay the bills.

I thought the movie had Bill Nighy in it, but thankfully (for his sake) I was mistaken. (If you don’t know who I mean, he’s the excellent actor who stole the show in Love Actually and Underworld, among other movies, with the sheer force of his presence).

If you’re even slightly tempted to watch Bloodrayne, and you don’t have a sponsor or some other responsible adult who can come over to your house and make you step away from your DVD player, at least go read the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes first. There are so many great ones, I can’t pick a favorite, so I’ll just cite this one: “This is a movie that begs you not to watch it.”

Another review at Rotten Tomatoes said that Bloodrayne was “not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail.” Trust me, you’ll have a much better time reading the reviews than you will watching this movie.

Immediately after watching Bloodrayne, we watched Silent Hill. I suspect that Silent Hill was pretty good, but by comparison it seemed brilliant.

I hesitate to praise Silent Hill too deeply because I also watched Valentine in the aftermath of Bloodrayne and even that didn’t seem awful at the time. Valentine was a serial killer movie starring David Boreanaz, Denise Richards, and Amy Irving’s daughter that Tivo recorded from basic cable at 2 a.m.

Last night I was listlessly watching the channel channel, the usual endless parade of crappy offerings scrolling round and round. Suddenly, a movie description yanked me out of my stupor. Something along the lines of “Chuck Norris as a Chicago cop trying to keep the evil sceptor out of the hands of the devil.” I underestimated what I was about to view, that’s for certain.

For starters, it’s a circa 1993 Miami Vice rip off. Chuck Norris is Kung-fu Grip Chicago Cop Frank Shatter. His partner is the quintessential neatly dreadlocked, effeminate and non-threatening, endlessly wise-cracking Black man played by an “actor” named Calvin Levels. The IMDB links to a Calvin Levels who is most assuredly not the Calvin Levels in this movie, because that Calvin Levels is an older white actor while the Calvin Levels in Hellbound is none of those things.

Levels gets a lot of weird lines that are either cloying and ineffectual in-jokes about his character’s sexuality or just painfully bad writing, such as when he tells Norris that the reason he told him to turn left because “he was tired of (Norris) going straight all the time.”

So anyway, Shatter (Norris) and Jackson (Levels) are partners and for some reason they have to accompany the body of a murdered rabbi back to Jerusalem and answer some questions for the Israeli police. The biggest question, why a demon needed to go to Chicago in person to kill this rabbi, is never answered. Apparently, despite having loyal satanic minions, this particular demon is a bit of a control freak.

So Shatter and Jackson go off to Jerusalem, Jackson protesting all the way because, as a Black man, it’s cruel to make him miss the basketball playoffs. It’s necessary for Jackson to go because otherwise there’s no one to play the comic foil to the lovable pickpocket scamp they of course take under their wing. (And then forget about in the middle of a car chase – presumably the kid spends 45 minutes of the movie laying on the floor in the backseat of their car???)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Jackson and Shatter go to Israel. Jackson is allowed to cart a priceless gold sceptor-top in his jacket pocket, despite the fact that it is the murder weapon. And a priceless and mysterious artifact. And the murder weapon. Did I mention that?

Now, of course, before they head off to Israel for much wackiness, they show the sceptor-top to a beautiful archeologist at The University, for reasons that are too stupid to bother to explain, but which do explain to us that it’s a priceless and mysterious artifact. She tells them that the sceptor belonged on the staff of a demon, but some monk broke the staff into 9 parts and buried it in 9 different holy places so that it could never be put back together – although the monk left a map that shows where each piece is located of course.

She knows this because her boss, who is played by the guy who does the voice of the baby on The Family Guy just happens to specialize in this particular myth but he can’t talk to them because he’s on a dig in…Jerusalem.

You’ll never guess where that’s going.

So Shatter and Jackson go to Jerusalem, which is portrayed basically as Baghdad circa 1932 so that we can have much Indiana Jones type wackiness while the producers take advantage of the non-union ultra cheap labor, er, I mean, the authentic locations.

We learn that “flea market” is Israeli for “swap meet.” Really. But that’s not my favorite part of the movie. My favorite part is when Shatter and Jackson wait for the Jerusalem police department to close for the night, break in, disarm the police station’s night security guard and…

They wait for the police station to close. For the night. They break in to the police station, which is closed, for the night. The police station has a security guard.

Excuse me, I have to put my head down for a moment.

You know, what happens in this movie isn’t really important. What is important is that this film take it’s place at the right hand of the Exorcist II in the temple of Bad, Bad Movies. Although Hellbound lacks a drunk Richard Burton, James Earl Jones barfing up a leopard, or a gratuitous Linda Blair tap-dancing sequence, it is, nevertheless, a thing of great Badness.

This fine, fine film, incidentally, was directed by stuntman Aaron Norris, brother of Chuck Norris. What a wacky coincidence!

It’s not so easy to make a great howler of a bad movie. In recent years, Madonna ‘s made more than her share: “Shanghai Surprise,” “Swept Away,” “Who’s That Girl,” among them.

In 2001, Mariah Carey starred in “Glitter,” which has only aged badly since its laughable premiere. And then there’s “Showgirls,” “Striptease,” “The Postman,” “Waterworld,” “Ishtar,” and the perceived king of kings, “Heaven’s Gate.”

Now add to the very top of the list, “Gigli” â€” directed by Martin Brest, who actually has another title on the list already: “Meet Joe Black.”

Witless, coarse, and vulgar, “Gigli” is worse than its advance buzz could have indicated. Starring real-life tabloid lovers Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, the film â€” if you can call it that â€” is a total, mindless disaster. Sitting in a screening last night with reviewers and feature writers, I could only think of one word: stupefying.

As many who were there muttered on the way out: “What were they thinking?”

First, the acting: Lopez and Affleck may have chemistry at home, but they have none here. Affleck comes off the worst. As hitman Larry Gigli, Affleck seems to be doing a bad imitation of James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano.

A thuggish Brooklyn-esque accent comes and goes, and Affleck never figures out whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy. While these gears are turning in his head, you can’t help notice that he’s a hitman wearing a luxurious Gucci leather jacket and gorgeous silk tops. He also appears to be wearing Ted Danson’s toupee from “Cheers.”

[more]

Then Friedman really starts to pick on the film.

Come on, the buzz is amazing. Just look at what other critics have to say:

And those two made it to the end of Monday night’s screening of Ben Affleck (search) and Jennifer Lopez’s (search) ultra-hyped “Gigli.” More than one person walked out.

The buzz on Ben and Jen’s first movie is so bad – think Madonna’s “Swept Away” — Revolution Studios even had trouble filling the L.A. premiere, giving seats usually reserved for stars to the fans waiting outside.

“It’s definitely not a fastball down the middle,” Revolution partner Tom Sherak admitted to The Post. “It’s a curve ball.”

What are you waiting for? Somebody needs to order us tickets pronto! Still not convinced? Check out these words from CNS, the ever-(unintentionally)-hilarious Catholic News Service:

…

On a much more disturbing level, the narrative is fueled by a warped view of sexuality inconsistent with Catholic teachings on the subject. Beneath the banality of the offensive sexual banter which pervades much of the dialogue is a more insidious denial of objective moral norms concerning sexual intimacy. Brest seems to suggest that sexuality is merely a malleable social construct — illustrated by Ricki’s waffling proclivities. The film’s moral relativism is summed up by Gigli’s mother (Lainie Kazan), who, shrugging off Ricki’s homosexuality, states, “Life is not always black and white” — in other words, there is no objective morality, only subjective shades of gray.

In “Gigli,” Lopez has hit new J-lows. If her next pairing with Affleck in the soon to be released “Jersey Girl” is anything like this clunker, she may be known as Jenny from the schlock.

Due to a sexual encounter, excessive sexually explicit and rough language, as well as profanity and brief strong violence, the USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O — morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R — restricted.

At the video store Saturday night I decided we should rent something really bad, try to find something to join Exorcist II et al in the Pantheon of Bad. We settled on Wild, Wild West. It wasn’t Bad, just bad; but it was a Bad Mistake to rent that sucker. First of all, everyone involved in that movie should have known better. Well, except maybe Salma Hayek. It was jaw-droppingly bad. The writing, directing, acting, pacing, special effects, score, sound design, lighting design, costume design – all bad. So bad I kept having to rewind the tape because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The opening sequence – the sequence that is supposed to suck you in and set the tone of the movie – SUCKED. That’s not a good start at all. And it was downhill from there.

Does it have rewatchability? Hell no. We shut it off after 45 minutes and went to bed. We never even bothered to finish it on Sunday. It was just so damn sloppy. Personal favorite bad moment: Will Smith stops a horse-drawn wagon full of nitroglycerin just as it skids up to a cliff. He’s, of course, hanging off the edge of the cliff. He gets the horses to back up and turns around to face the deep ravine he just nearly plummeted into. He looks across the chasm at the saloon, spots his nemesis, and then walks straight toward the saloon. As in straight across the chasm? Is he Wiley Coyote all of a sudden? You can hear his footsteps as he leaves the frame, proving that everyone involved cared so little about the movie that they forgot that there was a cliff, apparently. And that they didn’t care enough to Foley the sounds of boots walking on dirt. Yes, his footsteps are hardsoles walking on a tile or other hard surface. It’s very very jarring. If you don’t care enough to ensure a little continuity why should I care enough to finish your movie?

Director Barry Sonnenfield should have known better. Before you point out that he was Executive Producer of the short-lived Fantasy Island remake let me point out that he was also EP of the fabulous and short-lived show Maximum Bob. He should have known better.

I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to get through this entry without typing the word “ergo”, but I made it.

I enjoyed the Jaws reissue on DVD so much the other night that I felt compelled to watch the Jaws 2 reissue. I rented this one, I did not buy it. Let’s be clear – I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.

Jaws 2 was pretty awful. I knew it was bad going in, but I really didn’t remember it being this, well, awful.

There’s a fine line between bad and awful. But if you can transcend mere awfulness, you can reach the sublime state of Bad, which is more good than bad, really.

I believe I’ve explained all this to you before. My problem was that I had 4 mixed up with Jaws 3/3-D (the one at Sea World) which was was a bad/good interlude bordering on Bad before the franchise descended into bad/awful territory in Jaws 4D, wherein our hero pursues Brody’s widow and a drunk pilot played by Michael Caine to the ends of the earth.

You think the shark isn’t our hero? Oh baby, you haven’t seen all 4 of these in a row in a while have you? Yikes.

This took a deeper toll on me than the time we watched all of the Planet of the Apes movies – in their entirety – more than once over the course of one weekend. I thought I was made of stronger stuff but clearly I was mistaken. How do I know this? Because after I finished viewing Jaws 2 I got it into my head that watching a series of inferior sequels in one stretch was a good idea.

I not only watched Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, but I laughed. I didn’t laugh nearly as hard at Ace as I did at my next selection, the unintentionally hilarious Halloween 2.

I swear to you Donald Pleasance is method acting and has apparently been given the instruction to feel the pain of Cornelius in Escape from the Planet the Apes. He delivers a line and then shuffles off in this lurching way I can’t describe. Why does he walk that way? We never see his feet, maybe he’s wearing McDowell’s Ape-suit feet, necessitating the otherwise illogical loping/shuffling gait but still not explaining why he swings his arms that way. I simply don’t get it. Neither does Jamie Lee Curtis, which may be why her character spends the whole film hiding not only from her brother, but everyone else in the cast.